Egdon Heath – a fictitious moorland in Dorset

It takes a hardy soul to cross the bleak moorland – a Thomas Hardy soul… [1500 words 7 min

Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently invest the facade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the facade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting…
Return of the Native (Thomas Hardy) Chapter I

Through five days along the so-called Jurassic Coast, I'd worked my way up through the strata. First Devon’s Triassic red beds, and then the bit which actually is Jurassic, Dorset’s limestone and sea-bottom sands; followed by the Cretaceous with its chalk. And on another cold, grey evening, right at the end of my journey, I arrived into the geology of a mere 50 million years ago: the Tertiary. Instead of smooth grassland and wild flowers I was walking over sand, clay and gravel of a stony river-bed flood plain: Studland Heath.¹

Studland Heath and the Agglestone

Sandy tracks, torn up by horses, criss-crossed among the heather. Brown, bent horizons rose behind each other to the northwest, where the sky was slightly brighter, slightly more brownish yellow. The nearer moor hump was decorated with a tor of grey gritstone. The sky above it shared the colour of the damp sand and the wind-dried mud.

The paths converged to a stony track down into woods. A stream flashed between weeds, and it was very quiet in the shade below the heavy, late-summer leaves. Through a muddy gateway the track became tarmac. Between brick bungalows it ran down to the golf course, and the seaside hotels, and the sea.

Studland is, they say, the best remnant there is of Thomas Hardy’s Egdon. "The impeturbable countenance ... which, having defied the cataclysmal onsets of centuries, reduced to insignificance by its seamed and antique features the wildest turmoil of a single man." But you emerge from the heath over a barrier chain with a notice discouraging casual camper-vans. All day, traffic queues for two miles, engines idling, windows open to the exhaust smoke, for the treat of taking the ferry across Poole Bay to Bournemouth. And across the road, a beach so busy you walk between the moving bodies like a city street.

Studland Heath (middle distance) lies between Poole Harbour (left) and Studland Beach

A mile along the sand, the beach is empty again. Across the bay, the squared off Old Harry seastacks are like the more interesting sort of tower blocks, or possibly those prisons mentioned by Thomas Hardy. At this point official-looking blue signs warn of nakedness ahead. Gentlemen lurk among the dunes with bottles of body oil. A little middle aged fellow parades along the foreshore, his pot belly tanned copper-coloured, keen for us to see the ring threaded through his penis. A young couple emerge hand-in-hand from the sea, like a painting by Botticelli. At its end, a hot-dog van whose fully clothed chef serves a line of sand-coloured customers.

‘Return of the Native’ cover from the 1930s

The Return of the Native (1878) opens with Egdon Heath and a full chapter of sustained landscape description. It’s 1500 words before the first human figure appears: the Reddleman, almost a part of the moor himself, his antique wagon creaking along the old Roman road below the hilltop burial mound.

It’s a remarkable piece of outdoor writing. Remarkable even more because even in Hardy's own day, Egdon Heath no longer existed.

Inside Thomas Hardy’s Cottage, annual visitors far exceed the sales of his novels.² Outside, the thatch is black and damp, hollyhocks bent by the weight of the rain. More rain drips from the tall grey trees around the car park, where tourists are getting into waterproofs for the half-mile path of leaf mould and tree roots.

But at the stone memorial (erected in 1931 by his American admirers) I turn right, up through the thinning trees. A wooden signpost, grim as a gibbet, indicates the soggy grassy trod that's the Roman road used by the Reddleman. The path dips out of the wood into a bumpy landscape of heather.

Duddle Heath (or ‘Egdon Heath’) above Thomas Hardy’s Cottage, Bockhampton

Rain was still falling heavily, the whole expanse of heath before him emitting a subdued hiss under the downpour. A pine clump stands black like a cut-out against the grey sky. Somewhere behind it is Rainbarrow – where the Reddleman first sees Eustacia standing against the evening sky: where, a moment later, the villagers arrive to light their Guy Fawkes bonfire.

No moonlight rambles on Rainbarrows today. The public footpath across the heath is hemmed between two fence lines, barbed wire on either side. The heather stems, black in the rain, twist waist high across the path.³

She [Eustacia] followed the path towards Rainbarrow, occasionally stumbling over twisted furze-roots, tufts of rushes, or oozing lumps of fleshy fungi, which at this season lay scattered about the heath like the rotten liver and lungs of some colossal animal.⁴

“Star slime”, also known as “Star snot”

Eustacia at length reached Rainbarrow, and stood still there to think. “Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without.”

---

Alack, the night comes on and the bleak winds
Do sorely ruffle. For many miles about
There's scarce a bush.

In the Preface to ‘Return of the Native’, Hardy comes clean on the fact that ‘Egdon Heath’, if it exists any more, only does so in small leftover fragments all over Dorset. Meanwhile, when it comes to suffering a mental health crisis, in a thunderstorm, on one of the bleaker bits of Britain – there is one obvious literary forerunner. "It is pleasant to dream that some spot in the extensive tract whose south-western quarter is here described may be the heath of that traditionary King of Wessex—Lear."

King Lear (Penguin Shakespeare) cover illustration lino cut by Clare Melinsky

A bit of bad family dynamics, taken in by the flattery of two daughters and foolishly losing his temper with the third: and suddenly the aged king finds himself, after 80 years of fun and flattery, out in the wilderness in the storm.

They say Shakespeare did visit Scotland as a travelling player during the ‘lost years’ before his first play (Henry VI Part 1). This would explain why King Lear's blasted heath, like Macbeth’s as well, is a proper Scottish one: a place of nature, where the civilisation of the sixteen-oughties is threatened by witches and the unruly wilderness. Dear Goneril, for one, doesn't expect the old bloke to survive. But there, she remarks, it'll be educational for him.

And it is. Gradually he becomes aware that, for many of his Ancient British subjects, death in the wilderness is just a part of normal life.

Poor naked wretches, where so e’er you are
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as this? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this!

Today, unlike in Elizabethan England let alone prehistoric Wessex, the government is expected to be aware of social welfare issues. Those of us who suffer through the storm on the open moor are there for our own enjoyment.

At the end of King Lear, everybody’s dead: that’s Shakespearean tragedy for you. Thomas Hardy intended the same: but his publishers objected. Come on, Tom: you’ve slaughtered poor Tess of the Durbervilles, Jude the Obscure, that miserable Mayor of Casterbridge. Can’t you just give the readers a break?

So yes:  through the symbolic night storm of Nov 6th that's currently being the death of Eustacia, Thomasin is walking with her baby. Thomasin, who simply considers Egdon as "a nice wild place to walk in" .

To her there were not, as to Eustacia, demons in the air, and malice in every bush and bough. The drops which lashed her face were not scorpions, but prosy rain; Edgon in the mass was no monster whatever, but impersonal open ground. Her fears of the place were rational, her dislikes of its worst moods reasonable. At this time it was in her view a windy, wet place, in which a person might experience much discomfort, lose the path without care, and possibly catch cold.

So you like your places, pretty? For Hardy, as for us in our breathable Gore-tex membrane and dry boots, the moorland “appeals to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.”

Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity….

The chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.

For the more thinking among mankind: Rannoch Moor

Read Chapter I of ‘Return of the Native’ here .

1. This ‘Poole Formation’, at the south-east corner of Dorset, belongs specifically to the Tertiary Period’s oldest or Ypresian stage; named after a First World War battlefield, one made even nastier by the underlying clay geology.

2. Okay, I don’t have the statistics. But driving away from the National Trust car park, the single track lane was gridlocked for 20 minutes while cars backed into fields to clear the passing places – a phenomenon that I’ve never encountered in the H-labelled shelves in my local library.

3. ‘Rainbarrow’ in Return of the Native, ‘Rainbarrows’ on today’s OS map; three Bronze Age round barrows.

4. Star Jelly, or in Welsh "pwdre ser" meaning "rot from the stars"; in German Sternenrotz, or star snot. The best theory is that the stuff is frog or toad spawn jelly regurgitated by herons. It’s easily distinguised from dog-vomit slime mould, whic is a fungus (picture below).